Nothing in Nature Is Private

by Claudia Rankine

Poetry. African American Studies. "Claudia Rankine is a fiercely gifted young poet. Intelligence, a curiosity and hunger for understanding like some worrying, interior, physical pain, a gift for being alert in the world. She knows when to bless and to curse, to wonder and to judge, and she doesn't flinch. NOTHING IN NATURE IS PRIVATE is an arrival. It's the kind of book that makes you hopeful for American poetry."—Robert Hass

"I am excited by Claudia Rankine's poems, their elegance, their emotional force, their scrupulous intimation of multiple identities. Representing brilliantly the prismatic vision of a Jamaican, middle class, intellectual black woman living in America, they address the widest constituency of readers. This is a richly rewarding collection."—Mervyn Morris

Genres: Poetry

76 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
(source: Arizona State University)

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing in Nature is Private, the first of Rankine's books of poetry, is also the most traditional of any of the texts of hers that I have read. It contains a number of short poems, rather than long poems that are never clearly differentiated as with some of her other work. This text seems to be an exploration of racial identity and national identity - what it means to be black in America, coming from a Caribbean island. Rankine addresses both the loneliness of identity and the socialness of identity, though never seeming to argue for one over the other.

While this text was interesting to read, it had fewer phrases that grabbed me than did either Plot or Don't Let Me be Lonely. It is almost as if Nothing in Nature is Private is Rankine's first step in finding her own identity as a poet. She struggles at first with form and content - this is not to say that her form and content are bad in this book, but just that she is still working out her own personal relation to form and content - but eventually, in later works, comes into her own as a brilliant poet. Nothing in Nature is Private is a powerful first part of the journey.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a child could cover
her face and conjure a home
where mother and father wave
contentedly from the yard—

I would.

—from "Descending from Darkness."

Claudia Rankine, essentially, has been the greatest living poet since her first book.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear, quick narrative poems that build nicely into a whole story (loosely autobiographical-- from the lives of a few men and women in the West Indies to stories of a few black emigrants to America). I'm drawn to how simply race is spoken about and the way the Caribbean voices are written, both of which are difficult in poetry.

[Julia Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite ever